Updated: October 18, 2024 (October 18, 2024)

How Citizen and Pro Developers Work with Power Apps

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

Power Apps, a low-code platform for building line-of-business apps, targets citizen developers (who are nonprofessional developers, also known as makers), but professional developers also use it for certain tasks. This diagram shows tasks each developer type performs on the platform and tasks that both groups share (middle).

Citizen developers can perform the following tasks using Power Apps:

Design UI screens, which are the windows an app user interacts with
Specify data sources, which could be Excel workbooks, SharePoint directories or lists, Dataverse tables, SQL databases, or other sources accessed through connectors
Simple coding, using the Power Fx language, which is similar to Excel functions.

Professional developers can perform the following tasks using Power Apps:

Work on source code for advanced features, by assuming development of an app from a maker or by assisting the maker with ongoing development
Build custom UI elements and connectors, which a maker uses for specialized

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